Executive summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil or technlogy to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.
Reflecting on "lean" process, yesterday I focused on some aspects of "pull" and how envisioning a future that benefited and inspired other people, or pulling on brotherly love in the immediate present, could lift the spirits and support whatever other secular task was being done at the time -- including producing goods and services that generated profit for a corporation or nation.
I want to extend those ideas into the question of global social and economic development, and see what in there could possibly offer relief to the economic burdens so many people are now suffering, even in rich countries such as the USA.
Along those lines, I am very explicitly stating a normative belief that corporate leaders should be looking into ways in which intangible "spiritual" changes in their workplace could substantially improve their "bottom line" financially. This is consistent with McGreggor's "Theory Y" and the idea that human beings actually like to use their muscles, both physical and mental, to accomplish useful and helpful work and do not need to be whipped or terrorized into doing so if they can simply be given the means to see how their work benefits others that they care about.
This post is a continuation of the general theme I've been following, which is my understanding of a model that is consistent with science, business, and the Baha'i approach to globalization, development, peace, unity, and "spiritual solutions to economic problems."
I also found a nice thread this morning that's relevant,
Perspective: Spirituality in Development
[Editor's note: The following is adapted from a paper, entitled "Valuing Spirituality in Development: Initial Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually Based Indicators for Development," presented by the Bahá'í Faith at the World Faiths and Development Dialogue on 18-19 February 1998 in London.
Development, in the Bahá'í view, is an organic process in which "the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material." Meaningful development requires balancing the seemingly antithetical processes of individual progress and social advancement, of globalization and decentralization, and of promoting universal standards and fostering cultural diversity. In our increasingly interdependent world, development efforts must be animated by universal values and guided by a vision of world community.
Local and national communities that prosper in such a future will do so because they acknowledge the spiritual dimension of human nature and make the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual development of the individual a central priority.
The secret, of course, is that the "gasoline" in this engine is not in the "seeing the end customer" type of "pull", but is in the profound power buried in that misused word "care." This fact seems to me self-evident with a little reflection -- it won't have any motivational power to "see" how a task will help someone else unless you care about helping that someone else. If you are indifferent to their fate, then it makes no difference to you whether you're helping or hurting them.
But, wait -- isn't this simply "exploiting" the worker's vulnerable primitive spiritual beliefs in order to make a buck? Even if it works, which it seems to, is this activity morally acceptable?
I don't believe that God or spiritual principles only exist in the twilight or dark. I think they are perfectly capable of standing on their own in the bright sunlight - and, in fact, that may be one of their signature characteristics. They can withstand scrutiny. Like the power of gravity, they work whether you believe in them or not, and whether you realize what is going on or not. These are not phantoms that vanish when the tribe's belief in them weakens.
The laws of physics and chemistry are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a gasoline powered engine and using it to power your truck. There is some human pleasure, in fact, in doing that engineering task extremely efficiently, with as little noise and waste as possible. A powered up jet turbine engine is a wonder to behold.
Similarly, I believe that the laws of spiritual development are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a powerful and profitable corporation. Just don't be stupid about it.
The key here is that, as I've pointed out numerous times in discussing feedback loops, the whole nature of causality becomes a sort of resonance state, either/or relationships become "and" relationships, and before/after relationships become phase-locked dance relationships. As Peter Senge points out in "The Fifth Discipline", it is as correct to say that the water level in the glass controls the hand on the faucet, as to say that the hand on the faucet controls the water level in the glass. In reality, the mind and vision of the person you left out of that picture entirely is what is controlling both simultaneously and equivalently.
So, while it is true that the corporation can be a turbine engine, "exploiting" spiritual power and turning it into hard cash, it is simultaneously true that optimizing this process will reshape the nature of the corporation at the same time in a way pleasing to God. It's not clear, in other words, who is being exploited and reshaped by the constant structure in place that makes this all possible. More correctly, it is clear who is being reshaped, and it is BOTH the workers and the corporation, and, indirectly, management, and indirectly again, the whole culture that builds in reliance on these spiritually-fueled corporations. God is totally neutral about the fact that the process generates cash and employment -- those are human-level variables.
The fact that a permanent developmental piece is thereby generated that takes on a life of its own in converting social needs into socially-useful solutions is fine with God and is in a very real way a multi-level process of building the material body of God on earth.
Of course, to work well, the process can't be totally hijacked in a stupid and selfish fashion by "management", killing the goose to get one golden egg. Not only do profits have to be shared with workers, but control of the production process, and ultimately, control of the goals of the corporation need to be shared with the workers, who are the experts in this new vision. Again, this is not an either/or conflict, because the constant goal of both the workers and management is to do a great job of finding social needs and meeting them efficiently and effectively, and in so doing generate sustaining cash flow to workers, management, owners, and a whole raft of neighbors who also benefit.
The more the owners can push, nudge, and help the Chief Executive Officers of the owned companies to do a good job and finding and meeting social needs efficiently, the more financial rewards they will reap so they can continue to do this. Again, if they are stupid and kill the goose to get one quarter's golden egg, this won't work. Again, it turns out that a good understanding of the principles here means that BOTH owners and management have ultimately the same goal, as do the workers - which is to make this process sustainable and effective for the long run, which is consistent with society's goals and values.
At every level, the thing that can cause this to be noisy and inefficient is an attempt to break up the development of stable, sustainable, long-term growth in order to maximize some local month's or quarter's cash flow. That is simply harmful to everyone's long-term interests, regardless how attractive it looks locally.
And, unlike the world's supplies of oil or nuclear power, tapping into the grid of spiritual power and converting it to developmental progress and cash flow is not only non-polluting, it's the opposite - it's health and benefit generating -- or it can be, if not applied stupidly and short-sightedly. As the investor John Templeton has sought to demonstrate, development of wealth and prosperity is not something that has to be inconsistent with spiritual development and family values. What is immoral and inefficient and ultimately self-destructive is the failure to understand the process fully, resulting in stupid short-sighted efforts to push the engine over the red-line, or attempts to hijack the process so that management or owners get all the profits and workers get none, or so that the corporation gets all the benefits and the customers get screwed. That kind of stupidity will self-destruct rapidly.
There can be, and is, a multi-level, win-win-win solution here, once you allow for the compounding effects of feedback loops, keep a very broad horizon, and think in terms of the multi-level "holons" that Ken Wilber is fond of - that is, entire hierarchies of live that span multiple levels of scale. But, also, the process won't work if participants insist on trying to rip off customers, or eat the seed corn and remove strength from the system. A properly tuned system will be agile and will grow at whatever rate conditions allow and it's stupid to try to drive it faster than that because of some concept that only, say, a 37% return on investment per quarter is "acceptable."
The only people who are desperate for cash in the short run are those who have done a bad job of managing what they have and are now trying to cover that up with theft of God's resources somewhere else, "robbing Peter to pay Paul." Very large scale investors realize quickly that they will happily settle for any non-zero rate of return in real wealth if it can be made self-running and sustainable. And, once they realize that and stop over-driving the engine, in fact they get their original goal because the whole system can now stabilize and stop burning up all the energy fighting with itself, with two different pistons firing at the same time in conflicting directions trying to rip apart the camshaft or engine block.
There is, in short, a "spiritual" solution to our economic problems, and by "our" I mean the full multi-level hierarchy of "us" from individuals to corporations to nations. It's a "win-win-win" solution, and the rich can stay rich and get richer while so does everyone else -- provided we attend to spiritual principles through-out at all levels.
It's also a non-zero sum game, a tap root into an infinite supply of spiritual energy of caring for each other's welfare, which goes up when the population goes up. If we could all realize the principle involved, and stop trying to out small sections of the engine for personal short-term gain, we would have so much output that everyone would have way more than they do now in the long-term.
One thing would be lost, and that is something we need to let go of - the intentional, conscious effort of some people to be better than, richer than their neighbors. We have to let go of the totally destructive mentality that "It is not enough that I win, everyone else must lose!" We have to let go of a proportional disparity of wealth as a goal of the system. It's a stupid goal, and left over from the days of massive unidirectional exploitation, where there was a sense that if the "peasants" ever got strong, they'd revolt and kill the elite. The flames are fanned by those who believe that marketing the idea of "being better than everyone else" will cause more products to be bought, and ultimately more prosperity and wealth to occur.
Our planet is finite, however, and we're getting near the limit. There is no way 6 billion people can burn resources at the same rate the citizens of the USA do without killing the planet, literally. The solution is not to stop everyone else from getting rich - it is to redefine "rich" so that it doesn't involve insane striving to get "better than" each other.
The economic power of honest compassion and caring is much stronger as a business model than the false solution of trying to run the world on greed and competition. Nothing in God's plan or the world is in the way of everyone being healthy and wealthy and safe from terrorist attacks, except our own stupid efforts to sub-optimize the engine we have here at our disposal.
I wish someone at the Santa Fe Institute, or some other think tank, could simulate this process and demonstrate convincingly, in secular terms that our national and international financial leaders could understand, that it could, in fact, work that way.
If every person on the planet had food, clothing, shelter, health care, and honest compassion from their neighbors, I think the wind would go right out of the sails of violent extremism. It's like looking at the tremendous drop in interpersonal violence as you drive the mile and cross the river from Detroit to Windsor, almost certainly due to the fact that Canada has a social safety net and the US does not.
Somehow, we are trying to power the USA workforce with terror, fear of death, fear of loss, fear that their "enemies" might get "stronger than them", fear of being unemployed -- on the implicit myth that nothing else is strong enough to get people motivated to power the wheels of commerce and wealth. That's a stupid, misguided, out-dated concept. 50 years of studies with "Theory Y", well documented by the USA's Ross School of Management, show consistently that caring, compassion, and sharing are, in fact, the basis for a much more powerful engine of profit, agility, sustainability, creativity, innovation, stability, etc.
Some very solid case-studies are available on the links from "Positive Deviance - Kim Cameron"
and the book "Making the Impossible Possible" is a must see. (The video of the book is here, if you have a high-speed link. (Nov 6, 2006) It's an hour but just spell-binding if you've ever tried to get a hostile, reluctant department to do an impossible task.
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The reason we have such social conflict and rising unemployment is that we're trying to make a defunct, broken model work when there is a better one available. It doesn't involve people giving up any of their wealth to get there, only their myths.
And, it is not some idealistic dreamer's fantasy that this can work , but well-documented studies by a well-respected School of Management. At this point, the problem seems to be one of inertia and persuading the older generation to let go of "solutions" that turn out not to scale up to global size, regardless how well they worked from 1900 to 1950.
This post "Virtue Drives the Bottom Line" has links to the serious management literature.
There's a lingering fear that this will lead to communism, or socialism, or some other ism that will force the wealthy to become poor, and lead to the workforce becoming lazy and stopping productive labor, and cause corporations to stop seeking efficient distribution of resources to meet social needs. I don't think that's the case, but some rigorous economic modeling of the ideas would really help make the case.
Repeating the summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.
(Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda )
Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.
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